US Rights Activist Calls For Abolition of Prisons

American Civil Rights Activist Calls For The
Abolition Of Prisons

Racism is an even more
powerful force today than it was in the days of the
civil rights movement says Angela Davis an iconic American
civil rights activist and professor.

Speaking to a packed
theater at Auckland University, Angela Davis talked about
the effects of the growing prison industry on minority
communities and the racism behind it. She then called for
the abolition of prisons.

American civil rights
activist Angela Davis.

Mrs Davis gained
world wide notoriety and became a symbol of resistance
against racism in 1970 after being linked to a Black Panther
prison break, and spent 18 months in prison before being
acquitted on all charges.

“While certain elements of the
structure of racism we knew during [the 1960’s and
1970’s], particularly the legal structures have been
dismantled. This does not mean we have managed to eradicate
racism.” said Mrs Davis.

“It has become a part of the
structure of the institutions that shape our lives.” said
Mrs Davis, “therefore it is more difficult to perceive the
inherent ways in which racism functions.”

“As these
social resources are withdrawn and as programs are
dismantled, as resources for education and health are
declining, imprisonment functions as the default
solution.” she said.

According to the United States
Department of Justice, at the end of 2005 there were 2.2
million inmates held in state and federal prisons or county
and municipal jails. The figure represents the highest rate
of incarceration in the world.

Mrs Davis said that “If
one asks why is it that over 70% of people of the 2.2
million people who are in prison are people of
colour?”

The answer is often “Well obviously it has
nothing to do with race, all these people got a fair trial,
because the law requires a fair trial,” she said with a
touch a sarcasm in her voice. Human Rights Watch reports
that the rate of incarceration for black men is 3145 in
100,000, 6.6 times higher then for white men which is a rate
of 471 in 100,000.

She then went to explain the
prison-industrial complex as a vast network of corporations
that profit extensively from prisons.

This means that
they have “expanded stakes in the continued expansion in
the prison system” Mrs Davis said.

Department of
Justice records show that in December 2005, 7 percent of 2.2
million inmates were housed in private prison
facilities.

“The security state relies on our collective
fear,” said Mrs Davis. “We are called upon to fear
terrorists and therefore to assent to a global war on
terror.

“In the past there was the fear of the
communists [which led to] the Vietnam war. We fear crime,
and therefore assent to more prisons and ever more people
incarcerated, and in the US evermore people subject to the
death penalty.”

Angela Davis concluded her talk with a
call to “abolish imprisonment as the dominate form of
punishment.”

She called for people and the government
to look towards community based solutions. She suggested
policies such as instead of imprisonment; offenders could be
offered to finish high school or university.

Its not as
much a prison campaign, it’s an equal rights campaign, a
women’s rights campaign, a civil rights campaign, a family
campaign, and most of all its a human rights campaign, Mrs
Davis said.

Angela Davis was in New Zealand for just a
quick tour with one talk in Auckland and another in
Wellington.

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